Switching It Up

Variety is the spice of life. So, today's blog entry comes to you from a new coffeeshop: Atlas Cafe. Still in the Mission, but whaddya know, this particular shop is much whiter than the others I've seen in the Mission. This place is hip, hip, hip. They're playing Squarepusher!!! (Today's word: gentrification!)

I just witnessed a very heated interchange between a man and a woman here. The gist I got was that she asked if he would come back to her, and he said "I refuse. I just refuse. I refuse to deal with your comments about my driving. And the only way to really refuse is to just completely break it off." "Do you want a ride home?" she asked. "Umm... yeah."

Magill-a-kitty went to the vet today. Mission Pet Hospital. They're awesome. They answer every question I have, take their time, and smile a lot. I whole-heartedly recommend them. Magill's a-ok. The vet said she has very interesting fur coloration, and she seems very healthy. So, that means that on Tuesday she gets SPAYED. Dun dun dun. Bye bye womanhood! I wish I didn't have to do it, but I just can't deal with her going nuts once a month, meowing constantly, having her ass up in the air constantly. My little girl is growing up...

Today one of my roommates drove me around the city a little bit. We went mostly around the North Beach area, went to an Italian coffeeshop that she loves (she is of Italian descent, herself) that used to be a place where a lot of Beats hung out. I had a great latté.

This city is beautiful. And the weather is just my style, to boot. Today it was clear and sunny; nigh-tshirt weather. Of course, earlier this week it rained incredibly hard for a couple days. The bad with the good. Or, the one with the other. I shouldn't be so judgemental.

And, the other thing of slight note that I did today was check out the neighborhood Saturday flea market, near 19th and Alabama. Never have I seen so much cool stuff at such low prices. To put it another way, never have I seen so much stolen stuff in one place. Car stereos piled high as an elephant's eye. My visit was brief, as I got the call from my roomie for our afternoon drive shortly after I got there. But, I did manage to buy one of those cool hats that I see so many of around here (picture of similar hat included). I really don't know if I look completely goofy in it, but I'm going to try and work it out. Gotta experiment to learn new things.

Ok, so that's it for today! Tonight may hold a party. Or, it may hold a few hours of making music. Or both!

Testing 1

This isn't a great photo. In fact, it's pretty poor. Just testing out this flickr thingy that I'll be using to post pictures.

It's Picture Time, Everybody

I did it. I bought a digital camera. It should be arriving in about a week. It's a Pentax Optio S5i. It cost me about $275 (correction: It came out to about $340 once they informed me that it didn't come with a battery or charger at the base price...) with shipping and everything. Once I get it, your frixan-blog-reading experience will be seriously enhanced. Stay tuned.

The Castro!

I had my first tour of the Castro today, given by my new Jordanian friend. It's quite a neighborhood. For those not familiar, the Castro is a neighborhood in SF that is known to be the main gay district in the city. And, it is.

Key things I noticed/had explained to me about the Castro:

• There are many gay men (and women, but I saw many more men) walking around all over the place.


• A good number of the men have cute little dogs they walk around, presumably as conversation pieces with the attractive people they meet on the street.


• People in the district are very concerned with looking good and eating well. In the span of two blocks I saw four gyms and a handful of organic food stores, not to mention vitamin shops (and a crystal healing wand!).


• There are many, many, many rainbow flags flying about. At some places, they were lining the streets. I was told that the flag presents itself in front of an apartment building once the entire population of the building is gay. I'm not sure if that means that they convert the current straight residents, or if they kick the straight residents out and move in gay ones. I presume it's the latter.

So, that's what I learned today, in a nutshell. Other highlights included: a man with some killer calves, wearing a pleated skirt; some sort of shop that had trance playing constantly out of a speaker outside the shop (I've seen this elsewhere in SF, though); a personal ad with a large naked man saying something like "Hi, I'm Mr. Kong, and Mr. Kong needs to be fed!" It's a pretty cool neighborhood.

Estilito-to-be

Last night I got a haircut. I had been looking on Craig's List for a free bed (found one, by the way), and I came across a posting for a free haircut by a senior cosmetology student. Being the thrifty young man I am, I responded, and last night was my appointment.

I showed up early, waited awhile until it was my proper appointment time, and took a seat in the Styling Chair. Now, I've always been bad at telling barbers/stylists/estilitos-to-be just what I want in a hairstyle, and I think this is generally because I don't really know. This time, I thought I'd circumvent that difficulty by bringing in a picture, of myself, with about the hairstyle I wanted. In my search for a picture, the best one I came across was a photo-booth polaroid of myself and an ex-girlfriend. So, I showed it to the stylist, we'll call him Curly, and he asked if we could keep the photo out during the haircut so that he could use it as a reference. I said sure, although it felt a little weird to have a polaroid of me kissing my ex-girlfriend sitting out for the whole shop to see. (During the haircut, it prompted Curly to ask, "So, that's your ex-girlfriend?" to which I replied, "Yeah, that's one of 'em..." The conversation ended there.)

So, I sat there, for the next HOUR AND A HALF as he cut my hair. It was fucking long. The time, not the hair. My hair's a lot shorter now. He got about halfway through the haircut and realized he needed to cut it shorter, so he essentially started over, 45 minutes into the process. I can't complain. It was free. But I got a little nervous as it got later, and the women working there wanted to close up the shop, and Curly started doing frantic here-and-there snips to get it "just right". Meanwhile, this rather large guy who I guess runs the cosmetology school comes by and says "Oh wow, that's looking great, Curly," and I'm thinking "This looks pretty damned far from great! You don't teach these stylists shit! I could have cut my hair myself in half this time and it would look better! This guy's going to leave me with a sliced ear and 10 bald spots, and all you care about is getting those tuition checks!" But I didn't really say anything beyond "Yeah, that looks good. I like that, " with the implication: "Now stop cutting my hair and let me go home."

He finished, I bolted, only to realize after a few blocks that I'd left the damned kissy Polaroid at the shop. So, I went back to get it, self-conscious of the fact that I'd already mussed up the styling job the guy did because I didn't like it, and now he was going to see. But whatever. I got the picture back and headed home, feeling like everyone on the street and in the BART station was looking at me and whispering "Man, that is one FUCKED UP haircut. He must have gone to a student barber."

Then I got home and looked at the cut, messed with it, and now I like it a lot. Thanks Curly!

p.s. The guy next to me is talking about the "Power Structure" and "Tools of the Powerless". And I'm surrounded by Art Chicks. God bless art colleges.

It's a whole business now

Earlier this evening I visited the Elbo Room for a night of dub. It was really great music... better than I ever heard at a club in Austin. Makes me think that this city might be more "me". The 'Room was packed, really heavy bass, smelled like pot. Great styles, all of them, and the women were beautiful. Generous strangers. Loose lovers.

God Bless America.?

Jesus es su compadre!

... is what I just heard shouted over a PA at the 24th and Mission BART stop. So much Spanish to be spoken, living in the Mission. And, so little of it that I know. I've started to try soaking up all the bits of Spanish that I see on signs and flyers around the neighboorhood. "Wanted: Estilitos" was posted at a beauty salon by my apartments. Of course, an even better resource is my roommate, who was born in Chile. He speaks Spanish fluently. It would be nice to walk into one of the small grocery stores and be able to speak to the guy behind the counter in the same language that he's speaking to his friend standing next to you.

Everyone has a Mac in SF

... not really, but close. It goes hand-in-hand with hipness. Contradictorily, though, the MacWorld expo is an extremely geeky place. I should know. I was there today.

No, I didn't get to see Steve Jobs' keynote speech. That happened two hours before I got there, and you gotta be 1337 to get in. For those who don't know what that means, you get the gist. What I did see was a convention center packed with people, booths, iPods, Powerbooks, and lots of black jackets (but everyone in SF has a black jacket so that's nothing amazing). By the way, this is what my boss and I did today in lieu of going to the office (thus far, my job is pretty swizzank).

So, the announcements that I caught wind of: (And a quick note: those of you who care about any of this will almost certainly have looked these up on some Apple fan site... the rest of you will give the following a hearty, "Neat," at the most.

1. A new iPod. It's incredibly small (both in size and storage capacity, but not in price!). It costs $99. Dude, look on eBay... you can get way more bang for your buck. There are arguments against me, but really, this thing isn't that neat in my opinion. I think Apple's just trying to bring the iPod to the "common man" or some shit in a really stripped-down form. The presenter kept emphasizing how exciting the "shuffle" function is. For god's sake, they're even centering their ad campaign around this (and the fact that iTunes will "auto-fill" your iPod for you with random songs from your library). Wow, it's random, just like life.


2. iWork - now, this is cool. It's 2 apps. One of them is Keynote 2, an upgrade to their presentation software (think: PowerPoint). It just looks really sweet, and makes it easy for anyone to create flashy presentations. But what's cooler is Pages. This is their new Word Processing software. Maybe, just maybe, this will help to phase out usage of Microsoft Word (which sucks). Anyway, Pages makes it really easy to make really nice looking documents. And it has this cool feature where you can drag an image around on the page and the text orients itself around it. So, like, you can type a page of text, then put a big image of an orange in the middle of the page, and the text margins will curve around the edges of the orange.


3. Right about at this point in the blog entry, I feel like a big stupid geek.


4. Tiger. The next version of OS X. It has these cool widgets that can look up flight info, weather info, calculate stuff, work as a dictionary or thesaurus, etc. And they zoom out of nowhere when they come on the screen. Whoosh! It also has this thing called Spotlight that finds files really fast. And Automator, which makes it easy for people to automate just about any task they do regularly on the computer.

There were more announcements, but now I'm bored of writing about them. I'm going to buy a digital camera as soon as I can decide which one to buy. Once I have that, I'll start posting pictures of all the weird stuff I see around the city every day. Even the process for taking out my garbage is weird: You go down 3 flights of windy, dark stairs that open up into a small outdoor area. Then you proceed to walk kind of under the building, then out into another open area (between 2 buildings) and there (to the right) you find an area with 6 or 8 trashcans. I have no idea how many people in how many buildings use this same area, or how many other routes can be taken to get to this hidden garbage cove. It's just weird.

The girl next to me in the coffeeshop is browsing Friendster.

A Little Under the Rainy Weather

Back in Cafe La Boheme. I had to get out of the ruckus of the remodeled/remodeling flat. Painters are there today, Magill's back in a cage so as not to annoy them (so she's bitching constantly), and I'm fighting off a bit of sickness. I think it's just from lack of sleep during the whole moving process, and it seems to be going away. Coffee helps.

There's a table full of socialists right by me, perusing their copies of the Socialist Worker. Reminds me of Austin. The town, not any of the three people named Austin that I knew in Austin. But I digress. I got a bad impression of socialists en masse while I was in Austin. The stupid thing is, I got that impression from activists I knew that talked shit about the ISO. I really know very little about them. Maybe I should become a socialist. I'm still trying to meet new people.

It's rainy. It's been rainy. The nice woman who is letting me stay in her apartment told me that it's very rainy in San Francisco from about mid-December through February. I don't mind. I got a water-resistant Calvin Klein jacket for Christmas.

Yesterday I met a girl who teaches neo-tribal sensual middle eastern dancing. Through serendipitous synchronicity (is that redundant? it sounds nice), I found out that she went to elementary school in Oregon with a friend of mine from Austin. I happened to be reading an email from the Austin friend while I was talking to her. The world really is small. At least the world of people I seem to meet. Maybe that means I'm narrow-minded, as are all of my friends. Nah.

Dad should be in Colorado or something right about now. I hope he's well in the Caravan, en route home to San Antone!

Alone in Someone Else's Flat

I'm sitting on a newly-refinished wood floor in a newly-remodeled flat in an old Victorian in the Mission District, alone with Magill and a dog named Maya. Magill is sleeping on the counter. Maya is sleeping on the floor. I'm ready to sleep on the floor as well, what with all the moving around I've been doing.

This flat is the recent acquisition of a San Fran couple of whom I have only met the female half so far. It's clean with fresh paint and new appliances. It's also devoid of furniture, but that's supposed to change later today. I think I'll be sleeping on the futon here until Saturday or Sunday. I hope the futon arrives by tonight. The three other flats in this house are currently being remodeled, so hanging out here I'm hearing a lot of drilling, pounding, radio, and whistling. And I think I'm getting high from paint fumes. This woman was very nice and trusting to give me a set of keys to her place and then leave me here alone. I haven't given her a dime yet. She even fronted me on some Chinese food this afternoon. How great is that? This city is growing on me like bathroom-swabbed bacteria on agar. Word to Pam Sobey.

Right now my Dad is hanging out with a friend from high school whom he hasn't seen in 30 years. I think they were going to a coffeeshop. I will be meeting them later... that is, assuming my Dad found this guy's place to meet him, and that Dad knows my cell phone number. He could always drive back here and find me... that is, assuming he can find his way back here. I may sound like I have little faith in my Dad's sense of direction, etc. but really it's just a damned hard city to drive a Caravan around in after you've only been here a couple days.

Last night I went to The Attic then the Makeout Room with my Dad. At the Attic, a guy played old 78's on a wind-up Victrola. Mostly old blues. I drank Sierra Nevada. Dad drank Drambuie. I met three SF kids who told me to check out the show at the Makeout Room. One of them lived in Austin for awhile. His three top bars in Austin were Ritz, Lovejoy's, and Casino (el Camino). Needless to say, we got along well. He owns a smoke shop and told me to come by some time and we could drink port and smoke cigars. I'm there. Dad met a guy who is in the process of learning to play drums. He said his teacher is very spiritual... he thinks the drummer should realize that every time the drum is struck, it sends a beat through the whole Earth. And, one must strike the drums with this thought in mind. Oooo... Ahhhhh... Anyway, he was a nice guy with a fun Massachusetts accent.

After the Attic and its 78's, we went to the Makeout Room to hear Cat-A-Tac. The fact that some nice people recommended the show, and that the band's name in a palindrome, meant we had to check it out. We paid the six dollar cover. It kinda paid off, not just because the music was pretty good, but also because the bartender working there was the same girl I'd met when I was here for job interviews a month ago. She remembered me, and gave us the first round on the house, which included a Maker's Mark and ginger ale for my Dad. That stuff's not cheap, especially in the big S.F. Dad and I talked a lot, mostly about the band and their equipment. He told me how Kustom amps suck, and from what I heard of the guitar sound in that band, he's right. They played well, but their amps sounded like crap. One of the amps really accented the sound of the picking hitting the strings (clack, clack, clack), while the other amp sounded like mud. We got drunk and had fun.

Around 11:30, it was time for us to catch the BART back to Millbrae. We waited at the stop for a few minutes, then saw the lights that told us there was about 20 minutes until our train came. So, I told Dad I was going for some food because I was really hungry. I went back up to the surface (leaving the BART station charged me $4-fucking-50), got a fat burrito, then returned as quickly as I could. I returned to the sound of a train leaving the station, and no one in sight. In my drunken state I figured "Hm, guess the train was early, Dad got on and left me, and I should just eat my burrito and wait for the next train." Of course, my Dad hadn't left me. He had gone to look for a bathroom, and in the process he'd left the station through an emergency exit (foreseeing that he might get an erroneous BART charge like I did). He returned, and when he put his BART card in the machine again it said "See Agent", presumably because he'd left the station without swiping his card on the way out, so it wondered how he could be coming back in again. So, he went to the agent's booth. As he approached she was watching video of him leaving through the emergency exit. He told her he was going to find his son, or something. I was drunk when he told me everything that happened. It was funny though. That reminds me, we rode the Muni for free yesterday. That was cool.

So, Dad just called. Time to go meet him at (where else) Cafe La Boheme!

Eight hours later, I'm back in the same coffee shop. This time my Dad is with me. In the past eight hours, I've walked around the area near Market and Van Ness, caught a bus to Fisherman's Wharf, seen the sea lions 'arf'ing at Pier 39 for the second time in my life, caught a bus back down south on Van Ness, walked down Mission, and returned to this coffeeshop. Somewhere in there, I ate one of those sourdough bread bowls filled with clam chowder. I can't remember who recommended those to me, but thank you kind sir/ma'am. They're very good.

Now, we may go see some music, grab a drink, or just go back to the Travelodge. I'm sure Magill would appreciate the latter. Poor kitty.

After I left this coffeeshop earlier today, a guy at 24th and Mission asked me if I was into the Black or the White. I said no. I wonder what that meant. I figured heroin/cocaine. But I'm not sure. What ran through my head shortly after the exchange was the song "I'm Waiting For My Man" by the Velvet Underground. Cuz, you know, it's about waiting for your heroin dealer and whatnot. And me, when he asked about the black and white, I was waiting for my "Old Man". I've always been given to puns, and somehow this event falls in line.

Next: Getting drunk with Dad at a bar...

A Quick First Post

I'm sitting in Cafe La Boheme, in the Mission District. ZRNet would like me to be using their pay-for-it wireless service, but some good soul has an unsecured network that I can pick up inside the Cafe. As a result, I've created a blog for my experiences in this city.

Quick recap: My father and I drove for 26 hours straight from Austin to arrive in San Francisco, and we stayed in a Travelodge in Millbrae last night. Today I met people who have places that I might live in, and pretty much decided on where I'll be living, at least for 2 months. It looks like a good set up so far.

Magill (the kitty) is in a cage in a minivan right now, beneath the Travelodge. I feel like a jerk doing that, but there's nowhere else she can stay. She got to frolick around the hotel room last night, so she's not doing too bad. And tomorrow morning she'll have a flat to run around in with two dogs. We'll see how that works out...

I'm meeting Dad at 24th and Mission in about 2 minutes, so I'll wrap this up, and finish my coffee. I feel great that I have a place to live for tomorrow, and probably beyond. I have the rest of this week to soak up some city and get settled. Monday, work begins.